The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Read online

  But what did Elia Corcos himself really know? He had given the child’s motionless body a lengthy examination, reached his own baleful prognosis, and then, lifting his eyes had fixed them on the petrified ones of the two parents: the father an old man, the mother still just a girl. Down what roads would he have to journey to read those hearts of theirs? And who else would ever do so in the future? The epitaph dedicated to the little dead child in the tomb-monument at the Jewish cemetery (seven lines blandly enough carved and inked in on a humble upright rectangle of white marble) would say nothing but:

  HERE LIES

  GUIDO FINZI-CONTINI

  (1908–1914)

  CHOICE SPIRIT AND FORM

  YOUR PARENTS WERE READY

  TO LOVE YOU EVER MORE

  NOT TO GRIEVE FOR YOU SO SOON

  Ever more. A suppressed sob, that was all. A weight on the heart to be shared with no other person in the world.

  Alberto was born in 1915, Micòl in 1916: more or less my contemporaries. They were neither sent to the Jewish elementary school of Via Vignatagliata, which Guido had attended without completing the first grade, nor later to the Liceo Ginnasio1 G. B. Guarini, precocious crucible for the city’s finest, Jewish and not, and therefore a choice that was at least pragmatic. Instead, both Alberto and Micòl were educated privately; Professor Ermanno every now and then breaking off his own solitary studies of agriculture, physics and the history of Italy’s Jewish community, in order to supervise their progress himself. These were the mad, but in their way generous, early years of Emilian Fascism. Each and every action, everyone’s behaviour, had to be judged – even by those who, like my father, willingly quoted Horace and his aurea mediocritas – by the crude markers of patriotism or defeatism. To send one’s children to the state schools was in general considered patriotic, not to send them, defeatist, and therefore to all those who did send their kids there, in some way offensive.

  Notwithstanding this, although utterly cut off, Alberto and Micòl Finzi-Contini had always kept up a tenuous rapport with the outside world, with children like us who went to the ‘public’ schools.

  There were two teachers from the Guarini who acted as go-betweens.

  Professor Meldolesi, for example, who in the fourth year taught us Italian, Latin, Greek, history and geography, on alternate afternoons would take his bicycle and, from the suburb of little villas that had sprung up in those years beyond Porta San Benedetto, about whose views and prospects he would frequently boast to us, and where he lived alone in a furnished room, would ride it as far as the Barchetto del Duca, to remain there sometimes for as long as three hours. And Signora Fabiani, the maths teacher, would do likewise.

  From Fabiani, to tell the truth, we never got to know anything. Of Bolognese origins, a childless widow in her fifties, with a churchy air, she always seemed rapt to the point of ecstasy whenever she questioned us. She would continuously roll her light-blue, Flemish eyes and whisper to herself. She was praying. Praying, no doubt, for us poor things, almost all of us utterly incompetent at algebra, but also perhaps to expedite the conversion to Catholicism of those genteel Israelites to whose house she repaired twice every week. The conversion of Professor Ermanno and of Signora Olga, but above all of the two children, Alberto, so very clever, and Micòl, so vivacious and pretty, must have seemed to her a happening too significant, too urgent, for the probability of its success to be jeopardized by some silly lapse of discretion at school.

  Professor Meldolesi, by contrast, was not in the least discreet. He was born at Comacchio of a farming family, and for his whole school career educated in a seminary (he had very much the typical characteristics of a priest, of a small, sharp-eyed, almost feminine country priest). He then went to study Arts at Bologna in time to be present at the final lectures of Giosuè Carducci,2 of whom he boasted to be the ‘humble scholar’. The afternoons spent at the Barchetto del Duca, in an atmosphere saturated with the Renaissance, with tea served at five among the whole gathered family – and Signora Olga would very often return from the park at that hour, her arms weighed down with flowers – not to mention later, perhaps, upstairs in the library, sometimes after darkness had fallen, enjoying the erudite conversation of Professor Ermanno, those extraordinary afternoons evidently represented for him something too precious to deprive himself of the chance to turn them into a series of little speeches and digressions for our benefit.

  From the evening in which Professor Ermanno had revealed to him how Carducci, in 1875, had been the guest of his parents for some ten days, then had shown him the room he had occupied, let him touch the bed he had slept in, and gone as far as to give him, to take home, so that he could scrutinize it at his leisure, a ‘sheaf’ of letters in his own hand sent to the Professor’s mother by the poet, his agitation, his enthusiasm knew no limits. He went so far as to convince himself, and to try to convince us, that that famous verse from the Canzone di Legnano:

  O bionda, o bella imperatrice, o fida

  which clearly prefigures the still more famous lines:

  Onde venisti? Quali a noi secoli

  sì mite e bella ti tramandarono …3

  and at the same time, the great Maremman poet’s clamorous conversion to the Savoyard ‘eternal, regal feminine’, were inspired precisely by the paternal grandmother of his two private pupils, Alberto and Micòl Finzi-Contini. Oh, what a magnificent topic this would have been – Professor Meldolesi had once sighed in class – for an article to send to that same Nuova antologia where Alfredo Grilli, his friend and colleague Grilli, had for some time been publishing his subtle glosses on Serra! Sooner or later, employing, it hardly needs to be said, all the tact such a situation demanded, he might even signal this possibility to the owner of the letters. And, heaven permitting, given the years that had passed since, and given the importance and, it goes without saying, the perfect decorousness of a correspondence in which Carducci addressed the lady only as ‘adorable Baroness’, or ‘most genteel host’, and suchlike, one could only hope that this latter gentleman would not withhold his permission. In the happy prospect of a yes, he, Guido Meldolesi, would take care of the whole thing and, should he be given an explicit agreement by the one who had every right to bestow or withhold it, he would copy the letters out, one by one, accompanying those blessed shards, those venerated sparks of the great wordsmith with a minimal commentary. And what did it need, in fact, the text of this correspondence? Little else but a general introduction, glossed if at all with some sober historical and philological footnotes …

  Apart from the teachers we had in common, there were also the exams held for private students – exams that took place in June at the same time as the other exams, those of the state schools – which brought us at least once a year into direct contact with Alberto and Micòl.

  For us at school, especially if by passing we would be going up a year, these were perhaps the most enjoyable days. As though suddenly regretting the lessons and homework we’d just been rid of, we seemed unable to find a better place to meet up in than the school vestibule. We would hang about this vast entrance hall, cool and twilit as a crypt, crowding around the great white sheets which recorded our final results, fascinated by our own names and those of our companions, and to read them like that, transcribed in lovely calligraphy and exposed behind glass on the other side of a fine metalwork grating, induced in us a state of wonder. It was great to have nothing more to dread from school, great to be able to go out soon after into the bright blue light of ten in the morning that lured us through the entry postern, great to have in front of us long hours of laziness and liberty to spend however we pleased. Everything was utterly delightful, those first days of the holidays. And what happiness at the constant thought of our imminent departure for the sea or the mountains, where all notion of study, which still hung over and harassed others, would for us be all but wiped away!

  And so it was, among these others (mainly big rough country lads, sons of peasants, prepared for the exams by local village
priests, who, before crossing the threshold of the Guarini would look around bewildered like calves being led to the slaughterhouse), there would be Alberto and Micòl Finzi-Contini: not in the least bewildered, accustomed for years, as they were, to presenting themselves and acquitting themselves triumphantly. Perhaps they were a shade ironic, particularly towards me, when, crossing the entrance hall, they discerned me among my school friends and greeted me with a wave and a smile. But always polite, perhaps fractionally too polite, and good-natured. Exactly like guests.

  They would never come on foot, much less by bicycle, but in a carriage, a dark-blue brougham that had huge wheels with tyres, red axles, and was all shiny with varnish, glass and nickel-plating.

  The carriage would wait in front of the big entrance gate of the Guarini for hours and hours, only moving to seek out shade. Moreover, it should be said that to look closely at all the details of the equipage, from the big powerful horse, with its clipped tail and cropped and combed mane, which every now and then gave a majestic back-heel, to the miniature coat of arms that stood out in silver against the blue field of the doors, even at times to be given permission by the indulgent coachman in his informal livery, yet perched on the box-seat as on a throne, to climb up onto one of the steps of the footboard, and thus to contemplate at our leisure, our noses pressed against the glass, the entirely grey interior, sumptuously padded and in semi-darkness (it seemed like a drawing room: in one corner there were even some flowers threaded into a thin-necked oblong vase shaped like a calyx …), this too could be a real pleasure, and indeed it was: one of the many adventurous pleasures which abounded in those marvellous late spring mornings of our adolescence.

  4

  So far as I was personally concerned, in my relationship with Alberto and Micòl there was always something more intimate. The knowing looks, the confidential nods that brother and sister both directed towards me whenever we met in the grounds of the Guarini, were signs, I fully realized, of just this private understanding between us.

  Something more intimate. But what exactly?

  Certainly, to start off with, we were Jews, and this on its own would be more than enough. Nothing at all need ever have actually transpired between us, not even what little came from having exchanged the odd word. But because we were who we were, at least twice a year, at Passover and Yom Kippur, we came with our respective parents and close relatives to a particular doorway in Via Mazzini – and it often happened that having crossed its threshold together, the hallway we entered next, severe and dimly lit, would unleash a rite of hat-lifting, hand-shaking, obsequious bowing among grown-ups who, for the rest of the year, had no other occasions to practise such things; to us children this alone would be enough for us, meeting elsewhere, and above all in the presence of the uninitiated, to prompt the shadowy look or the smile of special complicity or connivance.

  That we were all Jewish, however, and enrolled in the registers of the same Jewish community, in our case counted for little. What, after all, did that word ‘Jewish’ mean? What sense could expressions such as ‘The Jewish community’ or ‘The Jewish Faith’ possibly have, for us, seeing that they entirely left aside the existence of a far greater intimacy, a secret one, to be valued only by those who shared it, which derived from the fact that our two families, not by choice, but by virtue of a tradition more ancient than any possible memory, belonged to the same religious observance, or more accurately to the same ‘School’? When we met each other at the Temple’s entrance, generally at dusk, after the proper, dutiful exchange of civilities in the dim entrance hall it was almost always as a group that we climbed the steep stairs which led to the second floor. Commodious, crowded with all kinds of people, reverberant as a church with organ notes and singing – and so high, up among the rooftops, that some May evenings, with its great windows flung open west towards the setting sun, we would find ourselves at a certain point basking in a kind of golden mist … – that was the Italian synagogue. So Jews certainly, but Jews who had grown up observing the same particular rite, we alone could truly realize what it meant to have your own family bench in the Italian synagogue, up there on the second floor, rather than down on the first floor, in the German one, so severe and contrasting in its almost Lutheran gathering of prosperous, burgherly Homburg hats. Nor was that the whole story: since it might well be understood even outside Jewish society that an Italian synagogue is distinct from a German one, with all the social and psychological details such a distinction implies, who else could begin to precisely delineate – to give just one example – ‘the Via Vittoria bunch’? This phrase usually referred to the members of four or five families who had the right to attend the small, separate Levantine synagogue, also known as the ‘Fanese’, situated on the third floor of an old Via Vittoria house, and so to the family Da Fano of Via Scienze, to the Cohens of Via Gioco del Pallone, to the Levis of Piazza Ariostea, to the Levi-Minzis of Viale Cavour, and to who knows which other isolated family group: all of them anyway people who were slightly odd, types always a shade ambiguous and evasive, whose religion, which in the Italian School had taken a more working-class and theatrical, almost Catholic turn, that was clearly reflected even in the character of the people themselves, largely extrovert and optimistic, typical of the Po valley, had in their case remained essentially a cult to be practised by the few, in semi-secret oratories at which it was opportune to arrive by night, in small numbers, slinking down the darkest and least known alleys of the Ghetto. No, no, it was only we, born and brought up intra muros, only we who could know and fully understand these things – things that were so elusive and irrelevant, but not for that any less real. As for the others, all the others, and first among them my much loved daily companions from both school and play, it was futile to think they might be instructed in such an occult zone of knowledge. Poor things! On this subject, they could only be considered crude simpletons, irretrievably condemned to live out their whole lives in the deepest pits of ignorance, or to being, as even my father would say, benignly grinning, negri goìm.fn1

  So, on these occasions we climbed the stairs together, and together we made our entrance into the synagogue.

  And since our benches were close by, down there at the bottom of the semicircular enclosure entirely bounded by a marbled balustrade at the centre of which loomed the tevah, or lectern, the rabbi would read from, and both of them in plain view of the monumental cupboard of carved black wood which guarded the scrolls of the Law, the so-called sefarim, together we would cross the great hall’s sonorous floor paved with white and pink lozenges. Mothers, wives, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, etc. had separated from us men in the vestibule. They disappeared in single file inside a little opening in the wall that gave onto a small dark room, whence, with the help of a spiral staircase, they climbed even higher into the women’s gallery, and in a short while we could see them again peeping down from between the openings of their hen-coop’s grille, right up under the ceiling. But even like this, dwindled in our company to only males – which meant myself, my brother Ernesto, my father, Professor Ermanno, Alberto, and occasionally Signora Olga’s two bachelor brothers, the engineer and Dr Herrera, down from Venice for the occasion – even like this we made a large enough group. And an imposing one at that. So much so that whenever we arrived during the ceremony we would awaken the most intense curiosity before we’d got halfway across the floor.

  As I said, our benches were neighbouring, one behind the other. We had the foremost one, in the first row, and the Finzi-Continis sat immediately behind us. Even if we’d wanted to, it would have been hard to ignore each other.

  Attracted by the difference between us, as much as my father was repelled by it, I was always on the alert for the slightest gesture or whisper coming from the bench behind. My vigilance was unfaltering. I picked up the chatty asides of Alberto, who, although he was two years older than me, had still to enter the Minyan,fn2 and who nevertheless hurried, as soon as he arrived, to wrap himself in the large black-striped an
d white wool tallitfn3 which once belonged to ‘grandpa Moisè’; but I was equally attentive to Professor Ermanno, affectionately smiling at me through his thick lenses, who would beckon to me with a sign of his finger to look at the copper etchings that illustrated an old Bible he had brought out especially for me from the small drawer. Likewise I would listen open-mouthed to Signora Olga’s brothers, the railway engineer and the phthisiologist, chirruping away to each other half in Venetian dialect, half in Spanish (‘Cossa xé che stas meldando? Su, Giulio, alevantete, ajde! E procura de far star in píe anca il chico …’fn4), and then they’d suddenly stop, to intone together in an extraordinarily high-pitched voice the Hebrew replies to the rabbi’s litany. My head was nearly always turned to one side or the other. In a line on their bench, the two Finzi-Continis and the two Herreras were there, little more than a metre away, and yet remote, unreachable, as though all round them was a protective wall of glass. There was little resemblance between the two pairs. Tall, thin, bald, their long pale faces shadowed with beards, always dressed in blue or black, and besides habitually imparting to their devotions an intensity, a fanatical ardour of which their brother-in-law and nephew, one could tell at a glance, would never be capable, those Venetian relatives seemed to belong to a world that was utterly removed from Alberto, with his tobacco-coloured jersey and long socks, and from Professor Ermanno’s English knitwear and ochre linen, his air of a scholar and a country gentleman. All the same, however different they were, I sensed a deep kinship between them. What did they have in common, all four of them seemed to say, with the distracted, whispering, Italian congregation, who even in the Temple, before the wide open doors of the Ark of the Lord, remained trapped in all the pettiness of their daily lives, of business, politics, even sport, but never concerned with the soul and with God. I was a small boy then, between ten and twelve years old. A confused impression, admittedly, but still essentially true, joined in me with a feeling of scorn and humiliation, equally confused but which stung nevertheless, that I belonged with the others, the congregation, the rabble to be kept at bay. And my father? Facing the glass wall behind which the Finzi-Continis and the Herreras, always courteous but distant, effectively kept on ignoring him, his behaviour was the opposite of mine. Instead of trying to approach them, I saw him (medical graduate and free-thinker, army volunteer, since 1919 cardholder of the Fascist Party, and sports enthusiast, in short the modern Jew) deliberately exaggerate his own healthy intolerance of any fawning or saccharine profession of faith.